Now retired, Walker, 76, still lives in Kalamazoo and in November was given the 2012 Humanitarian Award from the Metropolitan Kalamazoo Branch of the NAACP.

Inspired by Black History Month and a recent visit to a civil rights museum in Birmingham, Ala., I called Lewis to ask his take on American race relations a half-century after the Civil Rights Movement hit a fevered pitch.

It was 50 years ago this spring and summer King penned his famed "Letter from a Birmingham Jail; Birmingham Public Safety Chief Bull Connor used police dogs and high-powered fire hoses to disperse civil rights protestors; George Wallace tried to block blacks from the University of Alabama; civil rights leader Medgar Evans was gunned down in Mississippi, and King delivered his famed "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington.

Kennedy pulled no punches, saying he hoped "every American, regardless of where he lives, will stop and examine his conscience" about events in Alabama and elsewhere.

"We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution," Kennedy said. "... We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it and we cherish our
freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more
importantly, to each other that this is the land of the free except for
the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that
we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except
with respect to Negroes?"

"This is a problem which faces us all -- in every city of the North as well as the South," Kennedy said. "This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to 10 percent of the population that you can't have that right. ... I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that." (Click here for a transcript of Kennedy's speech.)

Walker said he remembers that speech.

"It was the first time that a president had spoken that forcefully" about civil rights, Walker said. "It focused on the dilemma that we faced as a democracy, and it was especially important because it was coming from the Oval Office. ... He made it plain the disparities" between white and black Americans.

Two years later, after a bloody confrontation between police and protestors in Selma, Lyndon Johnson made a similar speech in which he slowly intoned the mantra of the Civil Rights Movement: "We shall overcome."

So I asked Walker: In the half-century since, has America overcome its battle with racism?

"I know things have changed," said Walker, who had friends and relatives involved in the Selma march. "I know that just from growing up in Alabama, where people couldn't vote and on and on on. ... I remember as a 9-year-old walking by a white cemetery and seeing a black man strung up in a tree."

He referenced November's re-election of the nation's first African-American president. He also mentioned that today's young people, the millennial generation, tend to be far more tolerant and accepting of minorities.

"We've made tremendous progress," Walker said. "Enormous progress."

But, he added, "We've overcome so much, but it's now a new world, a new society, with new challenges along racial and ethnic lines," including issues surrounding immigration as well as income inequality.